Tranquility
by sustantivo
Summary: There is no great love without sacrifice.  How much is she willing to give up to be with him?  Duty? Family?  Honour?  And how much is he willing to give in turn?


_Ah, love, let us be true_

_To one another! For the world, which seems_

_To lie before us like a land of dreams_

_So various, so beautiful, so new,_

_Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,_

_Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;_

_And we are here as on a darkling plain_

_Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,_

_Where ignorant armies clash by night._

_- Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach_

What would her mother say if she was alive?

Tali paused, the zipper of her boot half way up her calf and stared at the man sleeping peacefully in his tangled sheets. He murmured in his sleep, his arm groping at the empty space she had just vacated, a frown appearing on his forehead as he dreamed. She pulled the zipper up and tip-toed to his bedside, running her fingers across the frown lines, and back into the thick curls of brown hair that trailed across his forehead. The texture of it against her bare skin sent shivers of pleasure down her spine and she leaned forward, savouring the ghostly heat of his breath against her lips. His frown eased away and he turned onto his side, one hand clenched in the sheets still warm from her body. He breathed deep and steady, the thick muscles of his chest and back shifting in a way that never stopped being interesting. She ran her fingers through the silky curls clustered at the base of his skull and across his ribs, feeling power bunch and surge as he inhaled.

What would her mother say if she could see her now? Would she understand? Would she condemn her daughter for neglecting her duty to her people for this human man, who could never be part of the Flotilla or give her children? All these questions had seemed so pointless just twenty hours ago, when they had vanished through the Omega-4 Relay without any real intent to ever return. Now they boiled up and over, disturbing the tranquility she should be feeling at this perfect moment where death and destruction were not immediate threats. Tali found her gloves, one underneath the couch and the other hanging over the edge of the barren fish tank, its seams damp and cold as she pulled it on.

She retrieved the glass face plate of her helmet and with a sigh of regret pressed it back into place. It hissed as it sealed itself in place and a moment later she felt her suit tighten, all excess air sucked out until she was shrink wrapped inside her layers of carbon rubber and vulcanized super fibres. The outside world dimmed as the helmet adjusted the light for her sensitive eyes and the helmets computer came online, bathing the world in a grid of pale violet lines, measuring depth and shape as she scanned the small cabin. Tali flicked it off with a bat of her eyelid and dialled up infrared with her omni-tool. The palate of soft greys was instantly replaced with a flat world of darkness, where Evan Shepard reclined in his bed like a brilliant crimson star.

Tali climbed back onto the bed, careful not to disturb him, and crouched on her knees with her hands folded in her lap. A bubble of saliva had collected in the corner of his lips and she wiped it away with her thumb, smiling as he smacked his lips in sleep and shifted again, his pupils moving erratically under his papery eyelids, painted brilliant lemon yellow by the infrared sensors.

Humans ran hot, or at least hotter than quarians or turians did. Something about that carbon-based DNA made them bipedal furnaces, and she could see him painted in a sea of red and orange. His chest was a wash of vivid crimson, lightening to orange and yellow on his long, mournful face, until it grew dim enough that she could make out the crescents of his eyelashes against his cheeks and the line of his usually grim mouth, softened by sleep into a gentle smile. His arms were paler still, especially at the joints where the thick muscles gave way to emerald, and his hands, fingertips like spears of sapphire on the cool white bed sheets. His stomach, where the muscles stood out in what she understood to be a desirable fashion, it lightened to yellow again, and green on the hips where nothing but skin covered the bone. Lower and the flesh darkened to orange again.

He was so beautiful. Tali bit her lip, watching his chest rise and fall, his fingers twitching unconsciously on the sheets, the cable-like veins standing out against the skin of his neck and sighed.

Whatever her mother might have thought, whatever the rest of her people might be thinking right now, he was beautiful. And he was hers. That counted for something, didn't it?

"Why did you get dressed?" The sound of his voice, husky and mellow with sleep, drew her from her thoughts, and she looked up. His eyes were jewels of orange light, mechanical components whirring warmly away in the cooler sheath of white collagen. She flicked the infrared scanner off with another bat of her eyes and he melted back into his normal colours, pale skin, green eyes, and a sleepy halo of brown curls standing out in irregular tufts as he pushed himself up off the pillow and rested his chin on his hand.

"Maybe I like it when you take off my clothes," she replied, leaning forward so she was on her hands and knees, staring into his eyes. She wondered what it looked like from his end, with his face reflected in her opaque mask and nothing visible beyond the luminous light of her silver eyes.

He was smiling though, so it probably wasn't anything too bad. In fact, he reached for her, pulling her down onto the bed beside him and wrapping his long arms around her, holding her snug and tight against his long body. His head curled down into her shoulder and he took a deep breath that inflated his entire chest.

"I think that could be arranged," his fingers dug into her hip through the padding of her suit and his voice was soft, with a ribbon of heat that went straight to the ache between her legs.

"There's the legendary human libido I heard so much about," Tali laughed, running her hands across his shoulders. Already her skin was itching to be out of her sealed gloves, caressing him, soaking his heat down to her bones as though she could live off it. She wanted to feel the warmth of his breath currently dead and useless against the column of her throat guard on her skin, taste the strange flavour of his mouth again. His head popped up and he regarded her quizzically.

"Seriously?" He asked, one sleek brow quirked in a sceptical expression. "Is that what they say about us?"

Tali laughed, brushing a few dark curls away from her forehead, smoothing them behind the delicate shell of his ear. "It's one of the things they say."

"What else?" He sounded genuinely curious, and rolled her over onto her back, resettling himself so he could recline between her legs and rest his chin gently on her stomach, just under her breasts. His large, surprisingly nimble hands were callused but gentle as they smoothed the wrinkles from her wraps, followed the curve of her shoulder and found her hand. It was amazingly intimate despite the barrier of the suit.

"Oh, you know," she waved her hand, feeling heat flood her face in a familiar blush as some of her research sprang to mind.

"Obviously not," he replied, a smile touching his lips again. "I guess this is the quarian modesty everyone talks about?"

She giggled and blushed again and he nuzzled his face against her stomach, as though he could push through the restrictions of her suit and get to the real skin underneath.

Tali was struck again by how beautiful he was, and not just in the strange mixture of erotic and aesthetic she had constructed. By normal human standards Evan was desirable she knew, even as a quarian, because none of the female members of the crew ever seemed to be able to stop talking about it. Everything from his hair to his buttocks was documented from afar and discussed with thorough, meticulous detail whenever two women got a moment to themselves. Even women who should have known better, like Kasumi, would occasionally sigh as he walked by, and Tali had heard Jack telling Gabriella that she would 'ride him raw given half a chance'. The statement had been loud, unfettered, and Tali was sure that Jack had meant her to hear it, meant to get under her skin.

But here he was, alive and whole after his harrowing ordeal with the Collectors, and he was with her. She smiled again, her cheeks aching from the constant euphoria that had enveloped her. And he was grinning, laughing, talking to her with that unfettered softness in his voice. It seemed, in this position, with their bodies laced together, among still tangled by the movements of their bodies hours before, entirely natural to call him Evan. It floated through her mind like a bar of music, precious and private. No one else called him Evan, not even Garrus.

"They say humans have hair everywhere," she supplied, staring up at the ceiling as she talked. Her gloved hands wandered through the curls of his hair. "Everywhere."

"Some of us do," Evan confirmed, she felt him shift so he was laying with his cheek pressed against her stomach.

"But not you," she said happily, remembering the relief she'd felt after peeling his clothes off and realizing he wasn't a pyjak underneath.

"Not yet," he grinned at her, his green eyes twinkling impishly as she looked down at him sharply.

"What does that mean?"

"If my dad is any indication, I'll probably lose this mop on my head and relocate it to my ass and the small of my back," his face was deadly serious, but his eyes glittered at her.

"You're teasing me," she said cautiously, hopefully, and felt a nearly tangible wash of relief when he laughed.

"Yep. My dad had more hair than I did when he..." His voice trailed off and his face went slack, bereft of expression. A few familiar grim lines reappeared around his mouth and marred the smooth skin of his forehead.

"Evan?" She asked.

He looked up at her, visibly shaking the sudden pallor off and smiled. "Never mind," he said, "tell me what other human legends you've heard."

Tali grinned. "Well, you steal children in the night of course."

"We do?"

"Oh yes. Your hands are too big and clumsy to make decent mechanics, so you break into quarian ships and steal children to build your star ships. Then you eat them when they reach puberty, so that they can't rise up against you." She watched with interest as he narrowed his eyes at her.

"You're kidding me," he said, his voice flat with disbelief.

"I'm actually not. My mother told me more than one human monster story when I was a child, to get me to stay in bed and be quiet. She said that since you have such small eyes you wouldn't be able to see me if I didn't move," Tali laughed at the expression on his face. "If it soothes your wounded pride at all, the stories she told about the Vorcha were much, much worse."

That didn't seem to soothe him. He chewed his lip as he resettled himself, his arms curling around her waist as his eyes examined the opaque face plate facing him. She was used to the expression, as though he could will his eyes to penetrate the fog of her helmet and decipher her facial expressions.

"And now you're in bed with the bogeyman," he commented, his tone unreadable.

"The bogeyman?"

"It's a human story, similar to your human one. Monster steals children out their beds, eats them, etcetera. My mother never forgave dad for telling me the story, I forced my way into bed with her every night for three months when I was six." He chuckled, tracing the pattern of her wrap idly with one finger. "It was hell for her duties, so she shipped me back to dad until I worked it out. He just told me the bogeyman couldn't get me if I pulled the covers over my head, and everything was fine. Mom just about spit fire when he told her," He laughed again, "I always wondered how the two of them stayed together."

Tali laid in silence as he spoke, his eyes distant with memory. She had never heard so much as a word about his father, and he had only ever mentioned his mother once when she had given them a tip on a defect Alliance soldier they needed to pick up.

"That's what my mother told me, that the blankets would hide me from humans, when I tried to force my way into bed with her and dad," she said softly and he looked up at her, grinning.

"Monsters aren't so different after all, huh?" He asked, his eyes twinkling at her.

"Not the six-year-old ones," she conceded.

"You don't think I eat quarian's now that I've grown up do you?" He asked, pushing himself up on his arms and straddling her. Suddenly the flavour of their encounter had changed, lost its warm glow of confidence and become something more primal, though not at all unpleasant. He leant into her neck again and one hand touched the carbonized rubber covering her throat before ranging down, across her shoulder to her breast where it lingered, stroking her through the suit.

The friction was enough to send a hot jab of desire up her spine and choke her voice into a whispery little whimper. She felt him take his weight onto his knees and the other hand was probing the seal of her helmet looking for the switch. His fingers fumbled for a moment and she found it for him, releasing it. She smiled as the suit hissed and loosened its grip on her.

"You never know," she said as Evan lifted it off and threw it onto the cushioned chair tucked in the corner beside his bed, "all this might have been a plan to catch me off my guard and get me out of my suit."

"Getting you out of your suit was definitely part of the plan," his voice rumbled, dark and smoky as he began unsnapping and unzipping her suit, "as for the eating, well, anything is possible."

He moved from her neck to her cheek, and she felt the delicious warmth of his lips and his breath on her skin. His eyes were closed, but when he opened them she had the familiar rush of exhilaration as she realized he didn't care what she looked like. Maybe he even thought she was beautiful, looking at her the same way she looked at him. His lips met hers, parted, and their tongues touched. His mouth was like silk, smooth and hot and so much wetter than her own, with a thick awkward tongue that threatened to overwhelm her. He was almost delicate when he kissed her, careful not to press forward too hard and their mouths danced together as his hands roamed over her, finding clasps, zippers, buckles.

Despite his limited experience, he seemed to have a good handle on how to get a quarian out of her suit. In moments he was tossing aside layers of padding. She lifted her hips off the bed and he slid the form-fitted, single piece under layer down her legs, trailing kisses down her thigh to her knee, where the quick heat of his tongue slid to the inside of her leg and tickled the crease of her knee. The raw sensation was overwhelming after a life of senseless isolation and it made her skin feel like it was rippling with heat. He ran his fingers up her thighs, Tali marvelled at the contrast of their skin, and across the smooth plain of her faintly muscled stomach. She sighed and arched off the bed, her eyes closed, drinking it all in. His lips peppered her stomach with kisses, and she felt his tongue tease the twin indents of her belly buttons, the higher and then a few inches down the lower. His fingers traced the delicate flare of her hip bones and down, the smooth hard line of her pelvic bone and lower until-

"Oh!" She cried, her eyes opening as his fingers moved against her. He looked up at her, a cautious look on his face. "We don't- I mean quarians- it just-" her mind stumbled, half a dozen sentences crashing together in her head into one stream of nonsense.

"I know quarian's don't do this very much, because it's a health risk," he said softly, his voice soothing, "but you don't have to worry about me."

"But what about the dextro-" She began.

"Mordin gave me pills," he assured her, and his fingers moved again, sliding between the outer lips of her sex and stroking her core with smooth, deft confidence.

"Oh! But couldn't you... still get... sick..?" She asked, her resistance fading with her burning blush, replaced by an entirely different sort of heat.

"Then I'll get sick. You might get sick by just taking your clothes off, so that seems only fair," he countered, and kissed the arch of her hip bone, his smooth ivory teeth gently nibbling the skin there. "Don't worry about it. Just relax."

It was becoming increasingly easy to do just that. He gained confidence steadily, as he found exactly where she was most sensitive. His finger slid into her as his tongue trailed down, over the smooth slope of her pelvic bone and she felt the first hint of its smooth, hot friction on her slit. It drew a long, amorous groan from her lips, which she had been biting hard while he explored her. She opened her eyes a sliver and the sight of his head bobbing between her legs brought another scandalized flush to her face. She had a delirious moment of wondering what her mother would think of this, and quickly banished all such thoughts before they extinguished the wonderful sun that was building inside her, filling her with weightless heat.

Evan was in all ways a confident man, and he played her body masterfully. He seemed to catch every reaction, a tremor in her legs, a sharp intake of breath, a clenching of muscles from a particularly pleasurable trick. His tongue, so thick and slippery compared to hers surged hotly against her, and his fingers worked slowly, exploring her until he found a place inside her that made her hips buck involuntarily off the bed. He chuckled darkly and pressed forward, mercilessly, until she was gasping, writhing, a high keening noise she had never made before escaping her pursed lips. The heat built, and built, and continued building, until she felt like she was wreathed in pure fire, until there was a fire kindling in her brain and in the pit of her stomach, burning her thoughts to ashes.

The release was unlike anything she had ever felt. Sex had been good, but this must be It, the sublime semi-mythical orgasm women so often complained about their partners being unable to give them. It exploded out of her mouth in the form of his name and her hands, which had somehow made their way into the thick tangle of his brown hair clenched against his skull as her back arched up, off the bed. For a long moment she was suspended in a moment of perfect sensation, her blood thundering in her ears, slamming against the base of her skull with a force that made her dizzy. Then it passed and she slumped back, boneless in the afterglow. She released her death lock on Evan's head and he grinned as he slid up her body and collapsed beside her on the bed. He looked more than a little smug, and his fingers traced lazy circles through the glistening sweat standing out on her skin.

"So... good, huh?" He asked innocently. He was positively smirking, watching her chest fluttering as she struggled to regain her breath.

"Kelah..." She murmured, as her mind slowly congealed back into sentience. "I guess we quarians don't know what we're missing."

"Hmm," he sighed, nuzzling into her neck and drawing her up against him, "I'm glad though. You'd have no reason to date us humans if we didn't have something to offer."

"I don't know about that, but it's definitely more than a few points in your favour," Tali agreed. She felt unbelievably mellow, and for the first time she felt detached from the ever-present worry of infection and illness. Evan stroked her shoulder and she rested her hand on his waist, closing her eyes. She felt sleepy now, her body boneless and sated. Evan trailed his fingers against the nape of her neck, playing with the downy strands of her hair, so different in texture from his own rough curls.

"Commander Shepard," the clipped mechanical voice of the ship's AI brought her out of her coital bliss, and the two of them looked up together as EDI appeared at her terminal, "we are approaching the Citadel. Jeff estimates our arrival at forty five minutes."

"All good things," Evan mumbled, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing. "I'll get dressed and head to the cockpit now, EDI."

It was strange to see the transformation overtake him. One moment was all it took to shake the softness out of his shoulders and back, the muscles coiling up tight and lethal under his skin. His face hardened, grim lines appearing around the mouth, which drew tight as a bowstring as his eyes grew cold and analytical. He aged five years instantly, and as he found his clothing and stepped into it he seemed to grow larger, harder, and Evan disappeared to be replaced by the legendary entity that everyone else knew. Shepard, Saviour of the Citadel, Defender of the Galaxy. He ran his hands through his hair, smoothing the amusing tufts and tangles out until the curls laid flat against his head. Tali slumped back against the pillows and sighed.

"I'd appreciate it if you stuck around once we docked to keep an eye on the repair crews. We'll probably have to hire a volus team," his lip curled with distaste, "and you know what they're like."

"Of course, Commander."

If the change in title registered with him in any significant way he didn't show it. He withdrew a bottle of pills from his nightstand and dry swallowed a couple of them before replacing them, before he turned to look at her. His eyes were inscrutable, but Shepard bent at the waist and kissed her lightly on the lips. Even that was different, more like a duty than the luxury it had been just moments before. She could detect a slight swelling of his lips, a redness that might become a rash and had a moment of concern.

With that, he turned on his heel and strode toward the door. He was lethal, a predator in every way and it showed in the most mundane details of his life, in his stride and set of his shoulders and the precision of his military posture. It was disconcerting in the extreme. He reached the door and it slid open, silently before him. He left without a backward glance.

Tali sighed, raising one hand to her forehead and breathing deep. Her thoughts circled back to her mother, to the Flotilla, to duty and responsibility and what it meant to disregard these things. Her skin was beginning to prickle, and when she sighed she felt a tickle in her throat. Standing, she went in search of her scattered clothes again.

I may continue this, with a chapter from Shepard's point of view a little later in the timeline, but I haven't decided yet. Thoughts?


End file.
